Agency

At the heart of Vismaya Kalike's philosophy lies a fundamental belief: children are capable actors, not passive recipients of whatever adults decide for them. This belief shapes how we design learning environments, how facilitators interact with children, and how communities come together around learning. It is also the reason why agency has become one of the central ideas in our work.

Yet despite using the term frequently, defining agency has never been straightforward. Within the Vismaya Kalike team, there has always been a strong intuition about what agency means. We recognise it when we see it. We celebrate it when children demonstrate it. We often describe our work as an effort to nurture it. But articulating exactly what it is has been more difficult.

This difficulty is not unique to us. Across psychology, education, sociology, and philosophy, agency has been understood in different ways. Each perspective contributes something valuable, while also revealing the complexity of the concept.

A useful starting point comes from Albert Bandura, who defined agency as:

“The capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one's life” (Bandura, 2001).

Bandura's definition is intuitive and powerful. It highlights that human beings are not merely shaped by circumstances; they are capable of influencing their own lives through purposeful action.

At the same time, this definition raises some questions for us. If agency is understood primarily as a capacity possessed by an individual, it becomes difficult to observe in practice. More importantly, it risks overlooking the social, economic, cultural, and political realities that shape people's lives. Children do not begin from equal positions. The opportunities available to them, the constraints they face, and the resources they can access vary enormously.

Taken to its extreme, an overly individualistic understanding of agency can unintentionally slip into victim-blaming—suggesting that people are entirely responsible for outcomes that are often shaped by structural inequalities and circumstances beyond their control.

As we reflected on these challenges, we found ourselves searching for a definition that felt both theoretically meaningful and practically observable in our learning centres.

Over time, we arrived at a simple working definition:

Agency is the transformation of one's own intention into action.

We refer to a single instance of this transformation as an agentic act.

A child deciding to apologise to a friend, a learner choosing to explore a scientific question out of curiosity, a facilitator experimenting with a new game, or a group of children organising a community event are all examples of intentions becoming actions.

The emphasis here is on the intention being self-generated.

Of course, no intention is ever born in isolation. Every intention is shaped by experiences, relationships, culture, opportunities, and social context. The distinction is not between purely internal motivation and external influence. Rather, it is between being the author of one's actions and merely being the executor of someone else's intentions.

A child who completes homework solely to avoid punishment is certainly acting. But a child who chooses to learn mathematics because they have become curious about it is demonstrating something different. The action originates from an intention that the child has made their own.

This distinction helps us clarify an important aspect of our understanding: agency is not the same as success.

If we imagine a cycle of intention → action → outcome, our definition focuses on the movement from intention to action.

Outcomes matter, but they are not always within an individual's control.

Children and communities often encounter barriers created by poverty, discrimination, social norms, unequal access to resources, or larger structural conditions. We do not believe agency disappears simply because an action does not produce the desired result.

For us, agency exists in the attempt to act, even when outcomes remain uncertain.

This understanding allows us to acknowledge systemic barriers while still recognising people's capacity to act within and sometimes against those constraints.

While this definition emerged from our own reflections, it also resonates with several strands of educational and psychological research.

The OECD describes agency as the capacity of learners to set goals, make meaningful choices, and act in ways that influence both their own lives and the lives of others (OECD, 2019). This perspective reminds us that agency is not merely about having choices available; it is about acting purposefully and experiencing that one's actions matter.

Self-Determination Theory, developed by Ryan and Deci, provides another useful lens. According to this theory, agency flourishes when three psychological needs are supported: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2020).

• Autonomy refers to experiencing some control over one's actions.
• Competence refers to feeling capable and effective.
• Relatedness refers to feeling connected to others.

When these needs are supported, children are more likely to act from intrinsic motivation rather than external pressure. Agency, from this perspective, is not only a capacity but also a lived experience: the feeling that “I can act, and what I do matters.”

Contemporary thinkers such as Henrik Karlsson have extended this understanding by describing agency as a combination of autonomy and efficacy (Karlsson, 2025). Agency requires both the ability to form one's own goals and the confidence to pursue them. Karlsson also argues that agency involves curiosity about reality, the ability to question defaults, imagine alternatives, and engage actively with problems rather than assuming that existing systems are fixed and inevitable.

This resonates strongly with what we hope children experience at Vismaya Kalike. Agency is not simply doing whatever one wants. It involves noticing possibilities, asking questions, imagining alternatives, making choices, and acting with purpose.

Research on learned helplessness offers an important counterpoint. Martin Seligman's work demonstrated that when individuals repeatedly experience situations where their actions seem to have no effect on outcomes, they may eventually stop trying altogether (Seligman, 1975). Over time, they begin to believe that their efforts do not matter.

In many ways, learned helplessness can be understood as the opposite of agency.

This insight invites us to pay attention to the environments we create for children. If learning environments consistently communicate that adults make all meaningful decisions, solve all problems, and determine all outcomes, children may have fewer opportunities to experience themselves as capable actors.

This concern appears powerfully in Danger School (Overell, 2025), which argues that contemporary childhood often involves excessive adult control. Children are frequently protected from uncertainty, prevented from taking risks, and given limited opportunities to make meaningful decisions. Adults organise activities, resolve conflicts, set goals, determine schedules, and often intervene before children have had a chance to navigate challenges themselves.

These actions usually emerge from care and concern. Yet the unintended consequence can be a gradual weakening of agency.

Children become skilled at following instructions but may have fewer opportunities to initiate, negotiate, experiment, fail, recover, and take responsibility.

From this perspective, agency cannot simply be taught through lessons. It develops through lived experiences where children have genuine opportunities to make decisions and experience the consequences of those decisions.

Educational research also helps us understand that agency is deeply relational.

James Paul Gee argues that agency emerges through participation in social worlds. Learners develop agency when they take on identities, negotiate roles, and influence the communities they are part of (Gee, 2004). Agency is therefore not only an internal capacity but also something that develops through participation.

This idea appears in many of our centres when children influence games, propose new activities, shape group norms, or contribute to decisions affecting the learning environment. In these moments, agency emerges through participation rather than individual independence.

Research on democratic classrooms offers similar insights. Studies suggest that children develop agency when they participate in decisions affecting their learning environments. Through dialogue, negotiation, collaboration, and shared decision-making, children learn that their voices matter and that collective life can be shaped together (Ekström, 2019).

This democratic dimension is important for us because agency is not merely about individual freedom. It is also about participation in shared life.

Critical educational perspectives add another layer to this discussion.

Scholars influenced by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's Capability Approach argue that agency requires not only personal capacities but also social conditions that make meaningful action possible (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011). Having abilities alone is insufficient if opportunities are absent.

Similarly, feminist scholars have pointed out that agency must always be understood within relationships of power. People's choices are shaped by social norms, expectations, identities, and structural inequalities. Agency therefore involves not only acting but also negotiating, challenging, and sometimes resisting restrictive conditions (Mahmood, 2005).

These perspectives help us avoid simplistic understandings of agency. They remind us that individual intentions are always situated within larger social realities.

Barbara Rogoff's work on guided participation provides another important insight. Rogoff argues that children learn purposeful action through participation in shared activities with others (Rogoff, 2003). Agency develops through collaboration, observation, and gradual involvement in meaningful practices.

This is an important reminder that agency does not emerge from isolation. Children develop agency through relationships.

Cross-cultural perspectives further broaden our understanding.

Research with Māori communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand suggests that agency is often understood in relation to collective identity, responsibility, and contribution to community life (Berryman et al., 2014). Similarly, Indigenous scholars working with Aboriginal communities in Australia emphasise that agency is deeply connected to cultural continuity, relationships, and collective wellbeing (Nakata, 2007).

These perspectives challenge highly individualistic notions of agency. They remind us that agency can involve acting responsibly within a community, not merely pursuing individual goals.

This understanding resonates deeply with our own experiences. Many of the most meaningful examples of agency we observe involve children acting together, caring for one another, resolving conflicts collectively, or contributing to the wellbeing of their communities.

Educational philosophers such as Gert Biesta offer another perspective that has influenced our thinking. Biesta argues that agency is not something teachers give to learners. Instead, agency emerges when learners are invited to respond to the world as subjects rather than objects (Biesta, 2015).

In other words, agency cannot be delivered.

It emerges when individuals encounter opportunities to make judgments, take responsibility, and act.

Similarly, design-based learning researchers such as Barab and Squire have shown that authentic problems and opportunities for testing, revising, and improving ideas help learners become active participants rather than passive followers (Barab & Squire, 2004).

Nel Noddings' work on care reminds us that agency must remain connected to empathy and responsibility (Noddings, 2005). Acting freely without regard for others is not the form of agency we hope to nurture. Agency involves recognising that our actions affect other people and learning to act responsibly within relationships.

For this reason, we see care and agency as deeply interconnected rather than opposing ideas.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that agency is not a fixed trait that some children possess while others lack. Nor is it simply a matter of giving children choices.

Agency develops through experiences of autonomy, competence, belonging, participation, responsibility, reflection, and meaningful action.

It grows when children are trusted with opportunities to influence the world around them.

One story from our centres illustrates this particularly well.

Aliya and Zara approached a coordinator and asked if he could help them purchase a cake and some cold drinks. Together they walked to a bakery. At the shop, Zara confidently spoke to the shopkeeper and asked for a good, fresh cake. After discussing options together, the girls selected a chocolate cake and asked about the price.

The shopkeeper quoted ₹380.

Aliya immediately responded that they did not have enough money. After some negotiation, the shopkeeper lowered the price slightly. Zara remained unconvinced and announced that they would go elsewhere. As they started to leave, the shopkeeper called them back and asked how much they could actually pay. After further bargaining, they agreed on ₹320.

When the coordinator offered to contribute money, Zara smiled and replied:

“Sir, we do have money. But bargaining is important. They always quote more than the real price, and we regularly buy from here.”

What is striking about this story is not merely the successful outcome.

Rather, it is the movement from intention to action.

The children identified a need, sought support, discussed options together, negotiated with an adult, communicated confidently, persisted despite resistance, and exercised judgment throughout the interaction.

Within this single incident, we can observe confidence, communication, emotional regulation, collaboration, self-efficacy, decision-making, and persistence.

These qualities are not agency itself.

Instead, they function as indicators that help us observe agency in practice.

This brings us to an important challenge.

Agency has increasingly become vulnerable to what researchers call the "Jingle-Jangle Problem." Sometimes different ideas are grouped together under the same label. At other times, the same underlying concept is described using different terms (Brandt et al., 2024).

As a result, agency often becomes entangled with concepts such as autonomy, motivation, intentionality, self-regulation, confidence, resilience, and self-efficacy.

Rather than treating these as interchangeable, we find it useful to think of agency as an umbrella concept.

Drawing on Stafford-Brizard's building-block approach, we see qualities such as self-efficacy, growth mindset, confidence, communication, collaboration, and self-regulation as important foundations that support the transformation of intention into action (Stafford-Brizard, 2016).

For this reason, when we observe agency in our centres, we often look for indicators such as:

• Initiating an action or activity.
• Expressing preferences and opinions.
• Asking questions.
• Taking responsibility.
• Solving problems independently or collaboratively.
• Negotiating disagreements.
• Persisting through challenges.
• Revising strategies when something does not work.
• Supporting others.
• Influencing shared decisions.
• Demonstrating confidence in unfamiliar situations.

These indicators do not define agency, but they help us recognise it.

At Vismaya Kalike, our goal is not simply to increase the number of actions children perform. We are interested in creating environments where children increasingly experience themselves as authors of action.

This influences how facilitators engage with children, how activities are designed, how decisions are made, and how learning spaces are organised.

Children are invited to make choices, initiate projects, shape activities, negotiate rules, resolve conflicts, and contribute to decisions that affect their shared lives.

Facilitators, meanwhile, act less as directors and more as companions who create opportunities, ask questions, offer support, and encourage reflection.

Ultimately, agency is not something that can be handed to a child.

It emerges when children repeatedly experience that their intentions can become actions, that their actions can influence the world around them, and that their voices matter within the communities they inhabit.

For us, nurturing agency begins with trust. It begins with the belief that children are capable of far more than we often imagine and that meaningful learning emerges when they are invited to participate as active authors of their own lives and contributors to the lives of others.

References

Barab, S. A., & Squire, K. (2004). Design research: Putting a stake in the ground. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(1), 1–14.

Berryman, M. (2014). Culturally responsive methodologies. Education Research and Policy.

Biesta, G. (2015). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy. Routledge.

Ekström, S. (2019). Children’s agency in early childhood education: Exploring participation and interaction. Routledge.

Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. Routledge.

Karlsson, H. (2025). On agency. Escaping Flatland Substack. https://substack.com/@henrikkarlsson/p-167633827

Kucirkova, N. (2024). What does child empowerment mean today? OECD.

Nakata, M. (2007). The cultural interface of Indigenous and Western knowledge. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 36(1), 7–14.

Noddings, N. (2005). The challenge to care in schools: An alternative approach to education. Teachers College Press.

Overell, M. (2025). Agency. New Literacies.

Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford University Press.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2020). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective: Definitions, theory, practices, and future directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, 101860.